


An Answer to this, too.

by a17tabris



Category: The Demon's Lexicon
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:07:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a17tabris/pseuds/a17tabris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick watches Jamie cook, and comes to some conclusions about lying and magicians.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Answer to this, too.

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, I just finished reading The Jewel in the Crown yesterday evening on the bus. I know most of you have heard this spiel before, but after reading something as good as that it feels necessary to make at least a half-hearted attempt to convince my friends to read it.
> 
> Enough of that. Harry Coomer reminded me of Nick, so I sat down on the bus this morning and read the first hundred pages of The Demon's Lexicon. Having so done, I had to write the following.
> 
> Title from the song Lullaby For You, from the game The World Ends With You.

Food was an issue, Nick decided. Not eating it. Like any growing boy, or any demon, and by now it was clear the way it hadn’t been for a while that he could be both, he liked to eat. The issue was who made it. Alan was the best cook. He just was. So it should be best when he cooked. That should have been it.

But then there was Jamie. Jamie was a bad cook. He burnt things, he dropped plates, pots, pans, kinves, and anything else he used, sometimes on people who weren’t even close enough for that to make sense. Nick guessed it was the magic that let him do it.

He didn’t think it was the magic that made it more fun when Jamie cooked. That was something else. It wasn’t the way he hummed while he nearly ruined everything, hummed the way Alan might have to show that he had things under control, but when Jamie did it it just sounded like he thought the humming might slow down the plates and make them break less when they hit the floor, or that one time they hit Alan’s foot and Nick noticed himself not diving on the blond’s throat to kill him for attacking his brother

That was surprising. That he’d stopped being angry at Jamie, really angry. That when Jamie harmed Alan, Nick wanted to do something that wasn’t kill him..He wasn’t even sure what it was, the thing he wanted to do, and that was annoying. It really didn’t make sense after that to want Jamie to cook, but he did. Even more.

His food wasn’t good. You could eat it, the same way you could eat Nick’s, but it wasn’t good. On the nights when Alan had been out shopping or translating in his room, it came time for dinner and the food smelled kind of like bland charcoal, and Nick always found himself wishing Alan had cooked instead. But in the afternoon, he wished that Alan would have something to do, so he could watch Jamie cook.

He cooked the same way he did everything else, with laughs that kept looking like they were going to turn into screams, and that sometimes did when he messed up or dropped something. They’d always turn back into laughs later- “I think the floor looks better this way. Kind of sparkly. Like the night sky.”, or something poetic and ridiculous like that- but the screams were still there. It was that fear that gave Nick such little patience with the kid in the first place, but he’d had no idea what it meant.

It had looked like the same fear he saw on all the weak ones wherever he went, the ones who saw power and feared it. It was only when Jamie’s own power became clear that Nick had to see what had really been going on. Most people would have been using the jokes to lie, to change the ground on their foes, to take things away from the realm of killing and move into a form of combat where they had the advantage. You looked at Jamie, and of course that was what you saw. It was all he wanted you to see. Not an extremely powerful magician.

So he was lying too. Nick was starting to understand lying these days, at least the kind Alan had done. It wasn’t really about words, when you got down to it. The words were just how you lied, or part of it. It was about making the world be what you wanted it to be just by telling it so. It was kind of like commanding a demon, even if Nick hadn’t tried dancing since the whole thing with Black Arthur- with his father- had gone on, and had no idea if the way he’d done things was really the way it worked at all. But it made sense to Nick that you could lie. He didn’t understand words, but looking back at things he’d liked plenty of times. The night he first met Mae and Jamie, really met them instead of just hearing about Mae and seeing what Jamie wanted him to see, he’d lied to a raven. It had been there, alive, and he’d used his sword to tell it that it wasn’t a living raven. He’d told it that it was a dead magician, and when he was done it had been.

That was what Alan had done to him. He’d had a monster, a baby demon, and he’d just repeatedly told it, with actions almost more than words, that it was a real boy. He’d always wondered why Alan got all teary at Pinocchio. In the beginning, it must have been Olivia who told the truth, but at some point the truth had changed. Alan was strong like that. It had shocked Nick to realize that lying was another way of being strong, not just a way of making up for being weak.

But that just made it harder to understand the way Jamie lied. Why would he want to make himself into the kind of thing he was at school, all purple shirts and blood and bruises when he let that Seb kid beat him up? He had so much power, why didn’t he just kill him? And once you knew about the power it was obvious. In every weak little swish and every scared little joke you could see him trying not to be what he was. You could see him trying to be- trying to be a real boy, was what it came down to. He wanted to be the same thing that Alan had made Nick into.

It was hard to tell who’d been less successful. Sure, Alan’d made a homicidal maniac, as Jamie had started taken to calling him in friendly moments, but he’d put together something that even the Market people couldn’t recognize as a demon. Only someone too used to finding weakness everywhere could look at Jamie and not see his power. It was there in every little swishing movement that he made a little more clumsily and weakly than he had to, making him go too far even in his weakness. It took a strong man to limit himself the way he was doing, and it was obvious from how weak he tried to be that he had no better idea of how to be a real boy than Nick did. And when he needed to get something done, Jamie was strong. He couldn’t hold himself back well enough not to be damn useful when the time came for it.

That was probably why watching him cook was good. It wasn’t a fight, and there was no death except some cow or pig or whatever they were eating, but Jamie tried to swish his way through dinner and wound up throwing all the strength he had at the poor glasses. Watching him break everything was fun because of the raw power that Nick could just smell in the air while he did it. Nick wasn’t enough of a real boy not to want that kind of power, and Jamie probably wasn’t either. Some things you just couldn’t lie about: a demon and a magician were a demon and a magician. At least as they didn’t have to look far to find power, as long as they were together.


End file.
